Abstract
"New institutionalism in organization studies has undergone a number of important shifts in focus over the decades, generating profound and fascinating insights on society, organizations, and individuals. This flourishing of insights has been underlined by the constant search of our field for general theoretical and empirical frameworks for elucidating meanings, which are at the core of the explanatory power of new institutional theory. This dissertation argues and seeks to demonstrate that semiotics, with its theoretical and methodological wealth, constitutes an ideal candidate for such a framework. To this end, this dissertation synthesizes major institutional research with insights of semiotics, and reviews and contrasts the core tenets of the two classical semiotic branches, i.e. Saussurean semiology and Peircean semiotics (Introduction Chapter). It goes on to apply semiotic insights to illuminate on three important issues in contemporary institutional research, i.e. understanding proto-institutionalization (Chapter Two/Study One - largely qualitative with quantitative evidence), unpacking actorhood in institutional work (Chapter Three/Study Two - theoretical), and unraveling multimodality in rhetorical artifacts (Chapter Four/Study Three - methodological, illustrated with a quantitative study with qualitative elements). "